John Oliver Created a Summer Blockbuster to Make You Care About Our Infrastructure

John Oliver is a virtuoso at making entertaining and enlightening television out of our most unsexy issues—judicial election, predatory lending, student debt—and this week he took on the granddaddy of unsexy issues: our very poor infrastructure.

How will Oliver make you care about this issue, which almost everyone agrees on but almost no one is doing anything about? As Oliver notes, “every summer [at the movies], people flock to see our infrastructure threatened by terrorists or aliens, but we should care just as much when it’s under threat from the inevitable passage of time.” So Oliver brought together Ed Norton, Vincent D’Onofrio, and other movie stars to make a trailer for an action blockbuster that’s all about the United States’ D+ infrastructure. He also manages to slip in a pretty good Bill Cosby joke along the way.